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A peculiar gurgling sound had come from the ends of the hose, and the flow depreciated greatly; instead of the steady gush of water, a slimy silt was coming out now, spraying and splattering about on the sides of the drainage ditch. Wildly Harry waved a monstrous paw. "Shut 'em off!" he yelled to Fairchild in the dimness of the tunnel. "It's sucking the muck out of the sump!" "Out of the what?"
"No, ye'll no', an' if ye do, you'll gang into the 'sump, an' we'll chap the bell oorsels" the sump being the lodgment into which the water gathered before pumping operations could start. "Sourocks" thought discretion the better part of valor in this case, and swearing quietly to himself, he signaled to the engineman at the top to draw them up.
The blaze had started back of Bear Cañon and had been swept by the wind across to Cattle and San Jacinto. The oil field adjacent had been licked up and every reservoir and sump was in flames. The whole range would probably be wiped out before the fire spent itself for lack of fuel. Crawford had posted a rider to town calling for more man power to build trails and wield flails.
"How is the sump hole under the shaft?" Dick asked. "Must be somewhere about seventy or eighty feet of water in it; but we can pump that out in no time. She isn't makin' much water. Almost a dry mine now, for some reason I don't quite get. Looks as if it leaked away a good deal, somewhere, through the formation. There wouldn't be no trouble in sinkin' the shaft."
The others he put to salvaging the engine and accessories and to throwing up an earth dike around the sump hole as a barrier against the escaping crude. All through the night he fought impotently against this giant that had burst loose from its prison two thousand feet below the surface of the earth. With the first faint streaks of day men came galloping across the desert to the Jackpot.
The shaft is almost always sunk at the lower end of the area owned by the proprietors of the mine, as by this means the whole pit naturally drains to the "sump," or well, at the bottom of the shaft, whence it is pumped up by the engine above; the loaded waggons, too, are run down from the workings to the bottom of the shaft with comparative ease.
As soon as the second reservoir was ready the tarry stuff was siphoned into it from the original sump hole. By the time this was full a third pool was finished, and into it the overflow was diverted. But in spite of the great effort made to save the product of the gusher, the sands absorbed many thousands of dollars' worth of petroleum. This end of the work was under the direction of Bob Hart.
He just shows up with the sheriff, and about twenty deputies, good and true, and says: 'Hike! The courts say it's mine. These is the sheriffs. Off you go, and don't waste no time doin' it, either! And so they hikes and have got this far, where they lay over for the night to comfort their insides with somethin' that smelled like a cross between nitric acid, a corn farm, and sump water.
He'd gone back quite a bit along the road, and, coming back with it, the light in his eyes, he had made a misstep, and the shaft the old Granite Hill shaft, you know it's close to the road. We found him in the sump at the bottom. There had been too much rain, but it is a deep shaft anyway.
"Had no time to do the assessment work after we located. Dug a sump hole, maybe. Brad jumps in when the field here began to look up. Company that shows oil first will sure win out." "How deep has he drilled?" "We're a li'l' deeper not much. Both must be close to the sands. We were showin' driller's smut when we lost our string." Bob reached into his hip pocket and drew out "the makings."
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